Loic le Meur reports getting spamblogged here

Loic le Meur, one of France's leading bloggers, says that he's listed as a spammer on our site. I couldn't get through to the link he puts there. But I did notice upon returning after a WiFi-free weekend in the Midwest that there was no spam in our comment inbox. Wondering if others are also getting blocked. We'll look into it.

Even after getting blocked from this site, Loic invites Heather and me to his Les Blogs conference in Paris. That's turning the other cheek in grand fashion.

07:03 AM

spam and other abuses

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Loic's link through to the DSBL's working again now (if it was indeed down earlier, that might tell you something). If you follow through, you'll see this is a link to the Distributed Sender Blackhole List which is one of the many global blacklists purporting to block genuine spammers by IP address. If he's right, and his listing on this resulted in your block, it would be more accurate to say that the mail spam protection or anti-spam comments blocker (whichever he used) that you or your provider choose to use counts entry on the DSBL as a reliable indication of a spammer, and it may or may not be.

Having said that, the IP he lists is a dynamic one (check whois), implying it's not always been his, so may have been used by a genuine spammer before him. Which implies that DBSL's inclusion of dynamic IPs it is over-zealous, and your mail administrator or provider may need to be questions on their use of that list. Blacklists are well known for being arguably over-zealous and you have to choose carefully which to use based on how much you hate spam compared to the chance of missing something genuine. Your site should control which it employs.

How disturbing it is, incidentally, that when you mistype a URL as http://http://anything it goes to microsoft.com, even if you're running Firefox, and even if you aren't using Windows. I'm wondering how they managed that. It's quite disturbing to see my name in the post above link straight to MS because of my typo. I assure you I don't work for them, and any misattribution to them of mistakes in the above text is their own fault for making the above URL go there. Link hereby corrected.

Posted by: Honey at September 29, 2005 09:57 AM

Worked it out. Firefox tries Google's "Feeling Lucky" (top hit) if it can't find a domain, and at least for google.com (the regionless one), the top Google hit for "http://" is microsoft.com. And for some reason Firefox cuts off everything after the /, otherwise it would look for it in the search string (bug/feature?). Sneaky, but probably not an MS's conscious strategy: I can't credit them with that :)